An apparatus including a first circuit, a second circuit and a third circuit. The first circuit may be configured to generate a plurality of first motion vectors and first error scores in response to a search of a macroblock of an image. The search generally includes a range of motion vectors of the macroblock. The second circuit may be configured to generate a plurality of second motion vectors and second error scores for a plurality of sub-blocks of the macroblock in response to a set of discr...

A method for performing video motion estimation in video encoding, in which a video signal consists of frames comprising blocks. In the method a combined comparison value is calculated between a current video block of a frame to be encoded and at least one other video block of another frame. The current video block of the frame to be encoded comprises a set of first data values, and the at least one other video block of another frame comprises a set of second data values. Data value pairs are fo...

An apparatus generally having a first circuit and a second circuit for motion estimation is disclosed. The first circuit may be configured to (i) generate a first motion vector for a block at an integer-pel resolution and (ii) determine a single block size associated with the first motion vector. The second circuit may be configured to (i) generate a plurality of second motion vectors at a sub-pel resolution by searching proximate the first motion vector using the single block size and (ii) dete...

A shared storage section 2 stores: moving picture data which is split in sequences, data necessary for encoding each sequence, and a processing state of each sequence. Based on the processing states stored in the shared storage section 2, each processor 1 selects one of the sequences and a process to be next executed for that sequence and executes that process, independently of the operation of any other processor. Based on identification management information, each processor 1 acquires an iden...

Plural sum of absolute difference devices are used to calculate distortions between specified parts of specified images in a video stream. The video can be from a video camera, or other device.

An image information conversion apparatus and method by which picture quality deterioration caused by conversion from inputted MPEG2 image compression information into MPEG4 image compression information to be outputted is prevented. When an I picture of an MPEG2 bit stream is to be converted into a P-VOP of an MPEG4 bit stream based on an estimated value of the complexity for each VOP, a scene change detection section detects whether or not the I picture includes a scene change. If a scene chan...

A method of detecting the reliability of a field of movement vectors of one image in a sequence of video images. The method includes a stage of calculating a stability parameter, Det_Stab(t), for the field. The parameter is based on a comparison (4), over two successive images, of the number of occurrences of the majority vectors of the movement-vectors fields of each of these images. A field is defined as stable if the variation in the number of occurrences lies within a predefined bracket. Rel...

This disclosure is directed to encoding techniques that can be used to improve encoding of digital video data. The techniques can be implemented by an encoder of a digital video device in order to reduce the number of computations and possibly reduce power consumption during video encoding. More specifically, video encoding techniques are described which utilize one or more programmable thresholds in order to terminate the execution of various computations when the computations would be unlikely...

A system for generating motion vectors in a motion estimator is configured for co-operating with an engine for calculating estimation error for generating motion vectors, according to estimation errors and/or motion vectors previously generated. The system comprises a program memory that contains program data for a motion-estimation algorithm, and a motion-vector memory that contains data identifying said motion vectors previously calculated. The system further comprises an arithmetic and logic ...

A method which calculates a motion vector based on a transformed picture obtained by Discrete Coefficient Transform (DCT) or a Wavelet transform, and an apparatus appropriate for the method. The motion vector estimating method in an encoding method for a moving picture based on a block, the motion vector estimating method includes dividing each of a (k-1)-th frame and a k-th frame into blocks, each of which has N.times.N picture elements, and transforming the blocks by applying an arbitrary tran...